Water Rescue Team pulls deer off Paugus Bay

Animal later found dead on shore

Members of the Laconia Fire Department's Water Rescue Team will file yesterday under "you never know what to expect when you're a firefighter." They spent several hours working to rescue a deer which had tried to cross Paugus Bay, but was unable to gain traction on the ice and was seen struggling for much of the morning.

After a successful rescue, the doe was left on the shore to recuperate, but the trauma apparently proved to be too much for her, as she was found dead later in the day.

The department was receiving calls for most of the morning from concerned residents about the troubled doe in the middle of the semi-frozen bay, which is ringed with motels, resorts, and condominiums. One of those callers was Les Schuster, who owns the Lazy E Motor Inn, and who first noticed the doe at about 10:30 a.m.

Schuster, who was watching the deer flail her hooves in a vain attempt to grasp footing, said it's not uncommon for small herds of deer to cross the bay in winter. This one, which seemed like a young adult to Schuster, went out too early, before the surface of the ice developed any texture.

The deer's path from the opposite shore showed the animal had followed a zig-zag pattern, looking for footing. After a couple of hours of scrambling, the deer was mostly lying exhausted on the ice, and would occasionally make an attempt to rise onto its hooves before collapsing once again.

The department's Water Rescue Team applied a modified version of its human-rescue techniques to the situation. Two of the department's more slender firefighters — Rick Hewlett and Kyle Joseph — attached themselves to a rope, donned dive or flotation suits, and began to gingerly venture out toward the animal.

"We do animals because someone else might think about going out there and then we've got to rescue them," said Chief Ken Erickson. Standing from shore, and communicating to Hewett and Joseph via radio, the chief cautioned them to keep a good distance between them to maintain a distribution of their weight. "If you hear the ice cracking, just stop, get flat and come back," he said to the men on the ice.

It took about 900 feet of the department's rope, and a few hundred feet more of Schuster's rope, before the firefighters reached the animal. Once there, Hewett was able to pass a loop of rope over the doe's head to begin pulling it back to shore. The two men pulled the doe back to a point by the Lazy E docks, where the ice remained solid up to the shoreline, but by that point the animal did not have either the strength or the traction to pull itself off the bay and onto shore, so firefighters ultimately pulled the 100-pound animal onto the snowy bank where it lied, eyes open and breathing.

Hewlett, one of the two who ventured out onto the bay and retrieved the deer, said he had dispatched "quite a few" deer as a hunter. "This is the first time I've helped a deer instead of killed it," he said. Hewlett said the ice was two to three inches thick all the way out across the bay, although many areas of the bay nearby was open water.

Schuster said Fish and Game officials examined the animal as it lay on the bank, and decided to leave it there to see if she would leave under her own power after the ordeal. By the end of the day, the deer was found dead, in the same spot that the firefighters had placed her.